sho

Care to supply your rigorous, formal definition of what animacy in an object is?

There's another term for the certain-death variety which I prefer - the "call of the void". I think that captures it nicely.

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make, if at all

That is a completely unsupportable claim. For all we know they might already be, for a brief flash at least.

Well, I'm staying exactly where I am. I'll be keeping my company on 1password, and my family too, because I think it's a good product. I don't personally use Omarchy, but I welcome anything that can bring more people to linux on the desktop, so I support that too. I don't agree with everything DHH says, but I absolutely despise online witch hunts so I guess I support him too just on principle.

Just felt the need to post that.

Nothing weird or exotic - just frequent daily work in two reasonably large applications, with a lot of testing and follow-through. I've found that as codebase size goes up, token usage does too - perhaps quadratically, and a complex back end application just costs a lot to work in, probably because it needs to map out so many pathways and interdependencies.

I tend to work in 5-10 or so parallel streams at a time so that also multiplies token use as a function of time. Much less and I'm waiting for it too much, much more and I can't juggle effectively. My new big project is of course to try to take myself out of the equation further and increase the parallel streams dramatically; pretty hard to get that right so still manual for now.

If you find yourself wishing for more Fable at the subscription rates, just buy another 20x account? I'm currently on 3, spaced out on Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Just as one is running out the next resets. Problem solved!

I feel the value I get far exceeds $600/m. It's a straight expected value calculation for me and I'm happy to pay. I wish they'd make it easier though - just sell me a 100x account for $1k/m and save the messing around.

Sol is supposed to be 5T according to rumour. The imminent Astra is allegedly 10

Well, do you see the value of writing notes for yourself occasionally, even though they might soon become stale in your constantly changing environment? Yes, right?

Same principle. It's a good idea to have a schedule to clean them up periodically - an idea you can also put into a note.

"Open Source" is still not a word. It is a phrase, a term, maybe even a thing - but not a word!

If Chinese companies are able to just reliably rent the damn GPUs then I really don't see how these restrictions are meant to be effective in the slightest. I guess it makes it less convenient and supply less certain, and retains some optionality for cutting off supply later?

If Alibaba can't bring the chips into China, but can buy a whole bunch in Thailand or Singapore or whereever (or secure exclusive rights via JV partners where relevant) and then just provide them as a service to its customers in China - what is the point? I'm sure many customers would actually prefer such an arrangement.

They mean that K3's native floating point is MXFP4, a newer standard that's not supported in Hopper, an older nvidia chipset, so it's impossible the GPUs in question were Hopper (the article specifically mentions H200s), which is correct.

Probably either the author or the people they interviewed got the specific GPU details mixed up or wrong. Maybe it was B200s.

And AI existed before, and will continue after, the rise and/or fall of any particular company.

I appreciate your nuanced take, but I think it's implausible that the "correct" balance turns out to be 0. That just defies all reason. We'll learn how to apply the tools in ways that maximize the benefit while minimizing the downsides - as we do with all new technologies. And there is a long, long way still to go in improving the tools themselves - we are not even close to "done" in terms of the AIs themselves. It's impossible they will ever be worse than right now. It's very possible - inevitable, even - they will be much, much better.

It's just not plausible to me that we don't find some way to leverage all that power without fatally undermining everything we're otherwise trying to achieve long-term. It's not plausible to me that skilled, knowledgeable developers like you would ever conclude that AI was never useful, always harmful, and that it is critical to the project's long-term health that you must do this 2,000-file internal refactor entirely by hand.

> it's trivial to see that if you tell a frontier model to do a coding task, it usually does it well enough

So you do not disagree? You agree 100%? Yes, it is trivial to see. Hence my near-anaphylactic reaction to articles like this, which specifically claim that it is NOT useful. Do you just mentally filter that out or something?

> Is [..] the codebase and my brain's relation to it is in a better state than if I had not used it?

But now this is a different question. It will not be the same, that's for sure. With new tools we must learn new patterns, new best practises. I have come around to the opinion that we must collectively move to a higher level of abstraction and accept that we will understand the code less - but I don't agree it must necessarily be worse. That will all depend on the new techniques we discover and apply.

> So somewhere on the spectrum between no-AI and vibecoding is probably ideal. Where on the spectrum is the argument, and everyone is going to have their own opinions based on their own domains. I don't see this as anyone being wrong or emotional.

I think that anyone planting a big flag at 0 (no AI) in 2026, with what we have available, is indeed doing it for emotional reasons, and when they claim there's no benefit being anywhere else, they're wrong. Which is what the article we're talking about is doing - hence my, and other's, scathing reaction.

Cute, but I'm not the one who wrote the blog post.

Let's try another tack. What would it take to change your mind?

> Why is one side of them automatically delusional? Could they know something you don't?

I wrote and deleted a couple of answers to this - they didn't satisfy, so I'll just be honest.

No, they don't know anything I don't know. There's now only one reason for denying that AI is helpful in software engineering, and that is emotional, be it fear of change or cultural point-scoring.

The only honest answer to the question, "Is modern frontier AI helpful in most software engineering?" is "Yes, of course it is." Anyone answering differently than that is, by now, simply wrong. Why they are wrong may vary, but they are wrong.

I suppose that would be up to the new owner? How would I know what happens to their services? You shouldn't conflate AI-the-technology with OpenAI-the-company. I'm super bullish about the tech, couldn't care less about a specific company. I mean, I hate Oracle like any other sane person, but that doesn't mean I hate databases.

I'm very confident that AI will continue to be available no matter what happens, at reasonable prices. We don't have to guess - we know what the open source models take to run, the hardware, the electricity, everything. They are served at a profit today - no-one is subsidizing them. Anyone can run GLM5.2 or (soon) K3 etc - you have capex and opex, you can serve X tokens per second, you sell them at Y price, it's just maths.

AI is a technology, not a company or group of companies.

You know, if I held an important opinion about something, and there was a fairly easy way to conclusively validate or falsify it one way or the other, and all it was going to take was a couple of bucks, I'd just pay it. Having good info about the world I live in is important to me.

Just saying.

Tell me, when the dot com bubble burst, and all those debt-laden companies collapsed and had buyouts and mergers, was the internet turned off?

There is no longer, in my opinion, any scope for reasonable debate that AI models like Fable 5 are net productivity increases for many, if not most, if not ALL, programming tasks. Anyone can, or should be able to, prove this to themselves in about 5 minutes.

And so if someone like the author is trying to argue the contrary, that leads me to believe they either: (1) have not bothered to spend even 5 minutes validating their belief or (2) do not care to test their beliefs against reality, for whatever reason. Either one is a bit of a red flag.

I find it fascinating how humans search for meaning in the unlikeliest of places, and how ancient tribal instincts will turn anything, anything at all, into an excuse for an in-group, an out-group, and a search for kinship on the most ridiculous little hill.

This "Anti AI Social Club" is just the latest example, and reality has nothing to do with it. Denying reality might just be the whole point.

It's a very human thing really.

You can! It just might be a little bit outside your budget.

> When the free money party stops

The Openrouter providers the GP referenced were never at the "free money party". The actual cost of running something like GLM5.2 is well understood and tokens from those providers are not sold at a loss.

Obviously running things locally is more expensive but that all comes down to economies of scale. GLM5.2 is as expensive as it will ever be, barring an increase in demand that forces/allows providers to realise windfall gains disconnected from their underlying costs (always possible, but not the point).

> It's always integers unless you have a VERY good reason to do otherwise

I don't really agree. This seems like one of those outdated "greybeard rules" which people love to cargo cult, but to me it just comes with its own set of trade-offs, like now you have to think about exponents everywhere and getting them wrong comes with orders-of-magnitude consequences.

If you have a modern DB and your languages handle its decimals well then I'd use them. You can translate as needed for imports and exports, but the core of your system is always sound. Switch to the more basic formats if and only if there was some perf problem with decimals, which for most fintechs will be a VERY long time with modern DBs.

What really pushes me towards decimals is the consequence of getting something wrong. Relying on comparing raw ints, with variable exponents baked in, can lead to catastrophic errors with multi-order-of-magnitude gaps if that implicit exponent isn't carried along correctly. It's a massive footgun always waiting to happen. Decimals avoid that whole class of problem. So the goal is to maximise the "safe" decimals as source of truth everywhere you can, and have very well-tested "in and out" paths for any producers or consumers with different representation preferences. To me, that's good system design. And when, not if, you're manually inspecting DB records to track down a bug, having everything normalized in a glanceable, obvious format like decimals will let you recognise errors faster and more intuitively.

This goes extra for crypto, especially stablecoins, where one USD stablecoin might be exp-6 and another might be exp-9. And you're representing them in the same DB! Off by a factor of a thousand if you miss that exponent! Decimalize that immediately says I.

Well, I guess this is the silver lining to the price increases. I'd been thinking about an M5 128GB for local inference (eg DS4), probably off the table now given that it jumped $2k overnight. But I was on the fence about it for a long time given that even the M5 is not that good compared to even a 4090. It would have been good, but not "omg" good.

If they are pulling out all the stops to make the M7 more competitive.. guess I can wait for that?

I'm going to leave my above comment for embarrassment/posterity, but since writing it I've driven GLM5.2 much more extensively and I take it back. 5.2 is surprisingly, even shockingly good. It seems MUCH better than when I tried it on day one, and I probably shouldn't have drawn solid conclusions from that as models often struggle a little on launch.

I take it all back, 5.2 is very much competitive with any Opus and Fable seems very much in reach if they can continue making these leaps. It seems ZAI has quite a lot more up their sleeve than I had surmised.

You may be right, and I certainly hope so!

But the question was about whether the Chinese labs will have fable-equivalence in 1 year. I am by no means some kind of insider, but knowing the vaguest outlines of what went into Mythos, they just can't do it. The compute is not there. The Chinese engineers are incredible, but they're not literal magicians.

Of course there could be something incredible to come out of left field and overturn the apple cart yet again, but that's speculation. It would be awesome, sure! But I wouldn't bet too heavily on it.

And FWIW - again, no disrespect at all to the Chinese engineers but I don't rate GLM5.2 as being even close to opus 4.6. It can hit a few benchmarks, sure, that's the top edge of the "jag". But filling in the rest of the capabilities - again, it takes compute and data the OSS labs just don't have, that anyone knows about at least.

I don't think we will. The open model labs are too resource constrained to approach Fable or even Opus on the general case and I don't see that changing within a year.

Right now, due to profound shortfalls in both data and hardware compared to the US labs, the OSS models are IMO basically technology demonstrators that in practise are even more jagged than the US labs' efforts. The high points of the jaggedness are close - but number of happy paths is many times fewer, and their behaviour inside the harness is far less refined. Barring some incredible breakthrough I don't think that is changing without a much higher level of resources - which seems impossible given the current hardware environment.

I have no reason to think that Anthropic or OpenAI are in possession of some secret sauce that the Chinese labs can't duplicate given the right resources, but the fact remains that absent those resources they'll remain behind. Barring some incredible bombshell reveal from Huawei I don't think this asymmetry resolves in a year. In three years it may well be a different story.